White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley took heat from business executives Thursday for the Obama administration’s regulatory expansions. Daley also said he didn’t have any good answers for some of what President Obama is doing and expressed frustration about the “bureaucratic stuff that’s hard to defend.”

“Sometimes you can’t defend the indefensible,” Daley said at a National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) meeting.

Daley couldn’t answer basic questions and continually faced criticism from the executives in the room. The business leaders even applauded each other’s criticism of the administration. “At one point, the room erupted in applause when Massachusetts utility executive Doug Starrett, his voice shaking with emotion, accused the administration of blocking construction on one of his facilities to protect fish, saying government ‘throws sand into the gears of progress,’” wrote Peter Wallsten and Jia Lynn Yang in the Washington Post.

Americans for Limited Government Communications Director and former Labor Department Public Affairs Chief of Staff Rick Manning told The Daily Caller that Daley’s inability to defend Obama’s regulations is an indication that the administration’s plans aren’t working. Manning also points out that Daley’s meeting may have large political implications.

“Business community to William Daley, your Jedi tricks don’t work on us,” Manning said in an email. “The chickens are coming home to roost from the wholesale assault by Obama on the free enterprise system and the private job creators who make it run. The meeting itself is incredible in that it demonstrates just how vulnerable Obama feels in 2012.”

The Workforce Fairness Institute’s Fred Wszolek told The Daily Caller that Daley’s lackluster performance is even more questionable when comes to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and its campaign against the Boeing Company. The NLRB has gone after the Boeing Company for opening a new plant in South Carolina. Boeing’s new plant is an addition to its already-existing production lines in Washington state. The NLRB’s case hinges on whether Boeing made the decision to open the new plant as “retaliation” against machinist unions in Washington, even though no jobs were lost there. In fact, Boeing has added thousands of new jobs in Washington.

As a former Boeing board member before taking on his White House job, Daley voted in favor of opening the new South Carolina plant. Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham has challenged Daley to come out and defend his vote in the face of the NLRB’s case, but he hasn’t yet done so.

“Bill Daley is White House chief of staff in an administration that is accusing a company where he served on the board of violating Federal labor law,” Wszolek said in an email. “The individual who launched the complaint against the Boeing Company was appointed to the post by President Obama and is currently a nominee. Now, to top it all off, Daley states he cannot defend the ‘indefensible’ conduct of his own administration, which presumably speaks to the Boeing matter.”

This man is an abject disgrace. He is everything I expected from God Damn America. There is no longer any question that God has set His face against America because it elected an evil demonic fool and will not drive him out of office in disgrace.

“Government throws sand into the gears of progress.” There’s your basic truth about reality that no Marxist Democrat will ever understand.

The lamestream dinosaur media is constantly out there telling us that only whackjobs ever even consider that Barack Obama might be a socialist. They put up a straw man: “He’s not trying to take your house from you,” as though there is no such thing as even a single degree between hard-core Marxism and free market capitalism.

For the record, there is. And Obama is waaaaaaayyyyy toward the side of that political spectrum that is taking this country toward socialism.

Obama has taken over banks and car companies, and wants to take over our health care system. He keeps propping things up when free market capitalism wants to let the system bottom out so it can rebound and reach equilibrium again. He believes in the redistribution of wealth so he can “spread the wealth around.” He believes in class warfare. He believes that private businesses are greedy and evil.

“To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.”

I didn’t carefully choose those radical leftists and communists as my friends. Did YOU?

Until now, precious little information has come to light about President Obama’s youthful political views. That may change as disclosures by former political science professor Dr. John C. Drew eventually surface in the mainstream press.

During an evening he spent with Obama in late 1980,Drew, a former Marxist-turned-conservative-Republican, recalled during an interview on Breitbart TV’s “The B-cast” that the young Obama was not only a passionate Marxist, but a Marxist-Leninist, devoted to the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist system in America.

The meeting occurred in late December, 1980 when Drew, a 1979 Occidental College graduate in his second year of Cornell University grad school, visited his girlfriend, still an Occidental student, who shared a political theory class with Obama.

Drew recalled that Obama, then a college sophomore, showed up in a BMW with his closest friend Mohammed Hasan Chandoo, and “we all went out to dinner, partied and drank, smoked cigarettes—and we did what young Marxists do—we basically argued politics.”

Before the get-together, his then-girlfriend described Obama as “one of us.” What she meant by that was that “he was on our team . . . a blood brother . . .a fellow revolutionary,” said Drew.

As a serious Marxist revolutionary himself in those days, Drew said that as soon as he met young Barack, he realized that this radical college sophomore wasn’t just “dabbling in Marxism . . . he was a Marxist-Leninist dedicated to the overthrow of the capitalist system.”

Drew says on his website (www.anonymouspoliticalscientist.blogspot.com) that his “most vivid memory of Obama was the way he strongly argued a rather simple-minded version of Marxist theory,” while he (Drew) had moved on to a more pessimistic graduate school view that true revolution would never happen in this country.

Drew’s meeting with the young Obama occurred shortly after he experienced his first taste of campus notoriety when publicly speaking out on the anti-apartheid issue and co-founding the anti-apartheid group that is mentioned in Dreams of My Father.

During their meeting, Drew recalls that Obama believed that “America was definitely the enemy, and American elites were the enemy, and whatever America was doing was definitely wrong and bad. He thought that perhaps the Soviet Union was misunderstood, and it was doing a better job for its people than most people realized,”Drew noted in a Newsmax interview.

Although Drew did his senior honors thesis at Occidental on Marxist Economics, his doctoral research at Cornell in 1984 triggered a move to the political right when he realized the fallacy of the Marxist class struggle argument.

However, when Drew crossed the ideological divide from Marxist to conservative Republican, it may have made his academic career a bit more challenging.

As an assistant political science professor at Williams College from 1986 – 1989, Drew was one of three registered Republicans on the faculty. Armed with his newly adopted belief system, Drew says he complained to the powers-that-be about the school’s affirmative action policies that favored less qualified African-American faculty candidates over white candidates, saying that these policies “took away the honor of being a Williams College professor.”

Now a grant-writing consultant in Laguna Niguel, California, Drew says that his meeting with Obama some 30 years ago provided useful evidence of why he was able to win the trust and support of people like Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, and Alice Palmer. He believes that Obama “never surrendered that tough, Marxist socialist ideology I saw in him as a sophomore at Occidental College.”

When Drew is asked why he took so long to go public with this story, he is quick to explain that although he tried to get the story out during the presidential campaign in 2008, no one in the media would touch it.

In fact, Drew says he was frustrated when he couldn’t get this information out during campaign season, since candidate Obama “was making it sound like people thought he was a socialist because he didn’t share his toys in kindergarten, but I thought he was a socialist because I’d seen him argue from a hard Marxist point of view.”

Obama’s career path was entirely predictable, according to Drew, who says the first logical career move for a revolutionary right out of college is to become a labor organizer or a community organizer. The second step is to become a college professor.

During his stint as a University of Chicago adjunct professor, Obama “was basically promoting the socialist revolution, saying that our Constitution promotes negative liberties but not the positive liberties of a society that advocates wealth distribution.”

Drew’s encounter with the future president nearly 30 years ago sheds some light on the young Obama’s political ideology, one of the many aspects of his life that has not undergone any serious scrutiny by the mainstream press. Drew regards his “15 minutes of fame” that began with a Newsmax interview in February, 2010 as an “opportunity to share what I know about the ‘red diaper’ ideology of the young Barack Obama.”

Saying that he would still be teaching in Massachusetts were it not for the liberal Democrats that control Williams College, Drew says he was pleased that Scott Brown was recently elected as the state’s newest senator, adding that his election “marks the end of the Obama revolution.”

My worldview was already fairly well established by the time I graduated from college. Which is why the notion that Obama was a radical Marxist-Leninist in college, but he’s perfectly mainstream American in his values now just seems like a total load of crap to me. And then you pair common-sense reality up with the fact that Obama was continuing to advocate Marxist notions even after he stopped being a student and started being a professor.

The same mainstream media that flew cross-country so they could dig through Sarah Palin’s garbage refused to look into Barack Obama’s record.

This is coming from Senator Blanche Lincoln, who basically is just beginning to realize that she doomed her re-election bid by helping Democrats try to jam ObamaCare down her constinuency’s throats. But a Democrat is a Democrat, and using the Democrat logic that a single Republican voting for one of their bills makes it “bipartisan,” it is therefore a “bipartisan” recognition that Obama’s White House is completely business illiterate:

Centrist Sen. Blanche Lincoln (Ark.) on Wednesday asked arguably the most contentious question during a discussion between Senate Democrats and President Barack Obama, hitting at conservatives and liberals.

Lincoln, who faces a tough reelection fight, asked Obama to push back against “people at the extremes” of both parties, especially against Democrats “who want extremes.”

She also took a swipe at Obama’s White House, referencing a constituent who “fears that there’s no one in your administration that understands what it means to go to work on Monday and make a payroll on Friday.”

Lincoln faces a steep reelection bid in 2010. She trails the likely Republican nominee, Rep. John Boozman, by 23 points and has only a 27 percent approval rating in a recent poll.

Obama responded by defending steps his administration has taken to right the economy and said “Moving forward, Blanche, what you’re going to hear from some folks…[is that] the only way to provide stability is to go back and do what we did before the crisis.”

The president reiterated that he would not return to past policies.

“If the price of certainty is for us to adopt the exact same proposals that were in place for eight years leading up to the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression…the result is going to be the same.”

But Obama conceded that “Blanche is right that we sometimes get bogged down in ideology.”

But I want to return to Blanche Lincoln’s “fears that there’s no one in your administration that understands what it means to go to work on Monday and make a payroll on Friday.”

Ouch. The truth hurts when you stink on steroids.

It’s significant that this is a bipartisan statement which Democrats now share with Republicans. Democrats were shrilly running every campaign against George Bush. Oh, everything was about “Bush’s failed policies.”

Now Democrats are running away from Barack Hussein just as frantically. And now all of a sudden everything is about Obama’s failed policies.

Critics say that one area where the Obama team lacks luster and diversity is in the realm of business. Few of his key people can point to significant business experience. In 2001, Bush had four former CEOs (including his vice president) in the Cabinet: career Texas oil man Donald Evans at Commerce; Treasury’s O’Neill, who had run Alcoa for almost 15 years; and Defense’s Rumsfeld, who had spent some 15 years at the helm of three businesses, including the international pharmaceutical firm G.D. Searle. Cheney had been CEO of the oil-services and construction giant Halliburton from 1995 to 2000. Even Bill Clinton recruited from business: Thomas (Mack) McLarty, CEO of the natural-gas company Arkla, became his chief of staff, and Hazel O’Leary, an executive vice president of a Minnesota utility firm, was his Energy secretary. (They failed to distinguish themselves in those posts, however.)

It’s actually far, far worse than that.

You want to see how the Obama administration compares to others in having people with actual business experience making decisions and running things?

Yep! Thats right! Only Eight Percent!!!..the least by far of the last 19 presidents!! And these people are trying to tell our big corporations how to run their business? They know what’s best for GM…Chrysler… Wall Street… and you and me?

How can the president of a major nation and society…the one with the most successful economic system in world history… stand and talk about business when he’s never worked for one?.. or about jobs when he has never really had one??!

And neither has 92% of his senior staff and closest advisers.! They’ve spent most of their time in academia, government and/or non-profit jobs….or as “community organizers” ..when they should have been in an employment line.

So when Blanche Lincoln points out that nobody in the Obama administration has any idea what it’s like to actually make a payroll, she’s completely correct.

What we have is a bunch of people who have either worked for egghead academia or the government their entire lives frantically pushing the buttons and pulling the levers of government to somehow stimulate businesses that none of them know anything whatsoever about.

(CNSNews.com) – Vice President Joe Biden told people attending an AARP town hall meeting that unless the Democrat-supported health care plan becomes law the nation will go bankrupt and that the only way to avoid that fate is for the government to spend more money.

“And folks look, AARP knows and the people with me here today know, the president knows, and I know, that the status quo is simply not acceptable,” Biden said at the event on Thursday in Alexandria, Va. “It’s totally unacceptable. And it’s completely unsustainable. Even if we wanted to keep it the way we have it now. It can’t do it financially.”

“We’re going to go bankrupt as a nation,” Biden said.

“Now, people when I say that look at me and say, ‘What are you talking about, Joe? You’re telling me we have to go spend money to keep from going bankrupt?’” Biden said. “The answer is yes, that’s what I’m telling you.”

Spend your way out of bankruptcy. There you go.

It sounds really good. But I’ve got a couple neighbors on my street who tried it – and it turns out that it doesn’t work out all that good.

You see things walking your dog every evening. Like what kind of cars people own, and what kind of expensive “toys” they have in their garage, and whether or not they’ve had pools installed or not.

There are two homes that are now standing vacant on my street. And both of them had two expensive luxury cars in the driveway, and a number of toys such as jet skis (in one) and quads (in the other) in the garage. And one had put in a below-ground swimming pool. Both couples were young enough that I wondered, “Where did they get the money to buy all this stuff?” up until the very day I saw the moving trucks and then the foreclosure signs.

Nope. You don’t spend to keep from going bankrupt. You spend to go bankrupt even FASTER. And, for the record, it is invariably excessive spending that puts people on the racetrack to bankruptcy in the first place.

Now, in business, or even in homes, one might make a relatively expensive purchase that will so reduce costs during the lifetime of the “gadget” that it justifies the initial outlay. A new computer system that will streamline and optimize the accounting system; a new refrigerator that replaces a worn-out, energy-wasting unit.

Now, no rational business owner or homeowner would make such major purchases if they are already deeply in debt: the best move for either would be to pay down their highest-interest debts, which would save FAR more money in the long run. Buying more stuff would just add to your already-too-high payments. Even a sound purchase is unsound if you don’t have the cash on hand to pay for it. I think budget experts such as Suze Orman (who offers such rare pearls of wisdom as “Saving is good; going into massive debt is bad”) would agree with me on this one.

But is Joe Biden talking about a big purchase that will save money down the road?

No.

Congressional Budget Office chief Douglas Elmendorf just got through telling Congress that the health care legislation at issue does not achieve “the sort of fundamental changes that would be necessary to reduce the trajectory of federal health spending by a significant amount.” And then he went on to say that, “And on the contrary, the legislation significantly expands the federal responsibility for health care costs.”

Answering questions from Democrat Kent Conrad of North Dakota at a hearing of the Senate Budget Committee today, Elmendorf said CBO does not see health care cost savings in either of the partisan Democratic bills currently in Congress.

Conrad: Dr. Elmendorf, I am going to really put you on the spot because we are in the middle of this health care debate, but it is critically important that we get this right. Everyone has said, virtually everyone, that bending the cost curve over time is critically important and one of the key goals of this entire effort. From what you have seen from the products of the committees that have reported, do you see a successful effort being mounted to bend the long-term cost curve?

Elmendorf: No, Mr. Chairman. In the legislation that has been reported we do not see the sort of fundamental changes that would be necessary to reduce the trajectory of federal health spending by a significant amount. And on the contrary, the legislation significantly expands the federal responsibility for health care costs.

Conrad: So the cost curve in your judgment is being bent, but it is being bent the wrong way. Is that correct?

Elmendorf: The way I would put it is that the curve is being raised, so there is a justifiable focus on growth rates because of course it is the compounding of growth rates faster than the economy that leads to these unsustainable paths. But it is very hard to look out over a very long term and say very accurate things about growth rates. So most health experts that we talk with focus particularly on what is happening over the next 10 or 20 years, still a pretty long time period for projections, but focus on the next 10 or 20 years and look at whether efforts are being made that are bringing costs down or pushing costs up over that period.

As we wrote in our letter to you and Senator Gregg, the creation of a new subsidy for health insurance, which is a critical part of expanding health insurance coverage in our judgement, would by itself increase the federal responsibility for health care that raises federal spending on health care. It raises the amount of activity that is growing at this unsustainable rate and to offset that there has to be very substantial reductions in other parts of the federal commitment to health care, either on the tax revenue side through changes in the tax exclusion or on the spending side through reforms in Medicare and Medicaid. Certainly reforms of that sort are included in some of the packages, and we are still analyzing the reforms in the House package. Legislation was only released as you know two days ago. But changes we have looked at so far do not represent the fundamental change on the order of magnitude that would be necessary to offset the direct increase in federal health costs from the insurance coverage proposals.

In other words, the Obama administration is going to spend a ton of money in order to buy something that will cost even more money than the thing it replaces.

Not exactly a Consumer Reports “Best Buy” recommendation.

So we’re back to the young homeowners on my block who splurged and splurged and splurged on toys and luxery items and fancy cars until long after they were already broke. And then they went “bye-bye.”

Don’t listen to Barack Obama and Joe Biden. They are genuinely clueless idiots who will quickly spend this country into bankruptcy all the while assuring us that they are somehow spending us out of bankruptcy. It doesn’t make any sense in your small business, it doesn’t make any sense in your home, and even though the federal government has a giant printing press to “make money,” it doesn’t make any sense in the White House.

Hot Air jumped all over this stunningly revealing statement from Barack Obama. I figured I might as well pile on:

Everybody’s watching what’s going on in Beijing right now with the Olympics. Think about the amount of money that China has spent on infrastructure. Their ports, their train systems, their airports are vastly the superior to us now, which means if you are a corporation deciding where to do business you’re starting to think, “Beijing looks like a pretty good option.”

Ed Morrissey had this to say by way of comment:

Well, as long as you forget about the oppressive Communist government and the lack of freedom and the Internet filtering and the re-education camps … China sounds really groovy.

Does Barack Obama understand the nature of the Beijing regime? The reason that the government can afford all of this spending is that they control the means of production and the wealth of the nation. They can confiscate what they want at will and spend it where they like. And in Beijing, they spent it where the cameras would be pointed.

Unfortunately, most of what the cameras see is just a facade, as Dale Franks points out at Q&O:The Chinese infrastructure that so enthralls Obama remains decades behind that of the US. What infrastructure China manages to build, however, gets its energy from oil and coal, not from wind and solar. China has become the highest emissions nation in the world and shows no sign of slowing itself down over concerns about anthropogenic climate change. In fact, the air in Beijing is so bad that outdoor Olympics events almost had to be moved.

Meanwhile, the regime where Obama thinks the world would love to do business maintains itself through brutal oppression. China blocked access to the Internet for international journalists despite promising to allow full access to reporters for the Games. They arrested reporters covering peaceful protests. And these are the actions they took while trying to make themselves look good.

If Obama wants us to build up American infrastructure, he can start by ending the flow of American wealth overseas for energy. Create hundreds of thousands of jobs by building the American energy infrastructure through drilling in the OCS, ANWR, and interior shale formations. Lower capital-gains tax rates to encourage more investment and generate more revenues (and jobs).

America needs a President who can see past the facades. Obama has given every indication of gullibility, first with his pledge to conduct presidential-level diplomacy without preconditions with regimes like Iran, Cuba, and North Korea, and now in declaring China the place to do business. Obama isn’t at all ready to lead this nation; he’s not even ready to run a business, with thinking like this.

Barack Obama’s statement on China betrays a fundamentally stupid as well as fundamentally amoral understanding of both the economy and the world.